HMS Leopard has made its way to Botany Bay, left its prisoners, and sailed to Pulo Batang, where the ship is declared unfit for war.

HMS Leopard, her rudder now remounted, sails from Desolation Island to Port Jackson, New South Wales, where she drops off her few prisoners.

The badly damaged Leopard is declared unfit for guns due to wood rot and is destined to serve as a troop transport.

Stephen learns from Wallis the overwhelming success of his scheme to damage French intelligence sources, and relays the name of a probable spy in the Royal Navy who had been mentioned by Louisa Wogan.

Jack and Stephen join a game of cricket, but it ends abruptly with the arrival of Captain Yorke and La Flèche, which also brings mail to them.

Though Stephen is greatly concerned with salvaging the numerous specimens he has collected from Desolation Island and New Holland, he quickly warms to Captain Yorke, a philosophical man who travels with an extensive library and a piano in his cabin.

The survivors drift through tropical seas for a few hot weeks, some dying of thirst and sunburn, before the boat carrying Aubrey and Maturin is rescued on Christmas Eve by HMS Java, headed for Bombay and commanded by Captain Henry Lambert.

George Herapath is a wealthy merchant and Loyalist whose trade with China is interrupted by the present war, as a British fleet is blockading Boston harbour.

Stephen also finally encounters his former love interest Diana Villiers, still the mistress of Harry Johnson, a wealthy American slave owner from Maryland who is active as a spy for his nation.

With the French agents' disappearance not likely to remain unnoticed for long, Stephen sends a note to Jack explaining his predicament and detailing a plan of escape that night.

Eager to escape to the British blockade before dawn, Jack steals a small fishing boat and sails out on the ebb tide with Stephen and Diana aboard.

They soon meet the thirty-eight gun frigate HMS Shannon as she enters the outer harbour on blockade duty, and are taken on board by Captain Philip Broke, Aubrey's cousin and childhood friend.

Broke writes a challenge to Captain James Lawrence, the new commander of the thirty-eight gun USS Chesapeake lying in harbour, to engage the Shannon in one-on-one combat, which alas never reaches him.

The battle lasts fifteen minutes, with Jack leading a gun crew, his wounded right arm bandaged to his body, while Diana recovers in the forepeak and Stephen waits below with the surgeon.

Captain Broke is mortally wounded, but Chesapeake ultimately strikes her colours to Shannon, the first significant British naval victory of the war.

The fictional Aubrey and Maturin have roles in both battles in the novel, first as accidental passengers on Java and then as prisoners of war in Boston who make a timely escape to Shannon.

Initially he considered himself unworthy of her, and not in a position to ask her to marry him, which Sophia Williams had encouraged him to do, knowing her cousin's feelings.

This is a book with a wrecked ship, a long distance open boat voyage with thirst and cannibalism, two naval battles, lots of exciting spy stuff, and a desperate escape.

There was no US publisher until W W Norton issued a reprint 12 years after the initial publication as part of its reissue in paperback of all the novels in the series prior to 1991.

Last year, however, W. W. Norton decided to reissue the series in its entirety, and so far nine of the 14 have appeared here, including the most recent chapter, The Nutmeg of Consolation.